Computer Science Department
Gridlock
Wesley Hershberger
Gridlock is a distributed, periodic job scheduling tool for Linux, which aims to reduce gridlock
in workload scheduling. Users provide a schedule with a list of jobs that should be run on some
recurring basis. The schedule specifies how often each job should be run and how to run the job.
Gridlock runs in the background and starts each job at its scheduled time(s). Gridlock makes it
possible to track job status and manage output from jobs. Jobs may specify prerequisite jobs to
build more complex workflows. Gridlock scales to run on many servers without a centralized
controller to reduce the impact of outages and prevent a compromised node from infecting the
whole network. It is designed to be useful to the hobbyist and home Linux administrator, but also
scale to the needs of business users with large workflows and hundreds or thousands of servers.
Gridlock modestly aspires to reduce gridlock more than its name might suggest.
Gridlock is open source software and can be found at https://gitlab.com/MggMuggins/gridlock